5 Best Practices for Implementing Cloud Backup and Restore

Digital threats and data vulnerabilities are more widespread today than ever, and having a firm cloud backup and restore strategy has become necessary for businesses of all sizes. Human error, cyber-attacks, system failures, and even natural disasters can occur, putting your critical data at risk.

A Cloud Backup and Restore solution can safeguard your business against unforeseen risks. Additionally, you can take advantage of the cloud's scalability and flexibility whenever necessary.

1. Understand Your Data and Backup Needs

Before setting up a Cloud Backup and Restore solution for your business, it's crucial to determine which data is mission-critical and should be backed up in the cloud. This understanding can save both time and resources.

Not all the data is sometimes critical; identifying this can save time and money.

You can achieve this by:

• Prioritizing the Important Data: Identify which data is crucial for your operation and business continuity.
• Assess Storage Needs: Calculate your storage capacity to back up your data. You can check this by analyzing the size of your data and how frequently you will be backing it up.
• Define RPO and RTO: Define how soon you need to be up and running after a failure (RTO) and how much data loss is acceptable over time. This will determine the right backup solution to employ and plan for your business.

2. Diversify your Backup Strategy

Relying on a single backup is risky and can endanger your data and operations. A diversified or multi-cloud backup and restore strategy can reduce these risks and provide a more robust backup approach.

• Multi-Cloud Approach: A multi-cloud strategy benefits you from all the cloud offers and pricing options. Also, if one cloud provider's service is down, your data remains secure and accessible on the other cloud.
• Hybrid Cloud: Combining on-premises storage with cloud storage can provide greater flexibility and control over your data. This approach allows businesses to store critical data locally for quick access while using cloud services for less frequently accessed data or for additional redundancy and disaster recovery.

3. Take Automated Backups

Automated backups are essential as they ensure that all of your important information is in the cloud, and there is less risk of losing crucial information.

Consider the following practices:

• Schedule Automated backups: Depending on the size of your business, e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, etc., you can schedule automated backups so that your essential data gets saved in the cloud.
• Monitor backup success: Regularly check that backups are running as scheduled and that no errors have occurred.
• Perform incremental backups: Performing a full backup each time can take a lot of bandwidth and storage space. Rather than this, you can perform incremental backups, which will only back up the changes made after your last backup.

5. Regular Testing of the Cloud Backup and Restore Process

Testing your Cloud Backup and Restore process is more than good practice; in other words, it's necessary. It verifies that your system is set up correctly and provides valuable insights into its performance during a disaster.

You can perform the following procedures:

• Regular Testing of Restore Process: If you want to know how efficient your system is, regular or scheduled testing periodically could be helpful.
• Apply Real-World Scenarios: Rather than performing documented scenarios, you can apply real-time scenarios such as a sudden power outage, disaster, or even a hardware failure.
• Measurement of Recovery Time: Tracking the recovery time of your system will verify that the recovery time was appropriate and whether it aligns with your business's Recovery Time Objective (RTO ) requirements.

6. Monitoring and Optimization

After your data backup has taken place, monitoring and optimizing it is essential. This will ensure that the performance is maximum and the charges are minimal.

For this, you can take the following steps:

• Tracking of Storage: You should keep track of the storage being used for cloud backup, and it should be optimized. This will ensure that the stored data isn’t accumulated and you are charged the minimum amount.
• Backup Speed and Bandwith Consumption: The uploaded data size can be enormous and burden your network speeds. To tackle this, you can prioritize the backup process or schedule the time when bandwidth usage is minimal.
• Setup Alerts:?Getting timely alerts can help you proactively cope with the problems related to Cloud backup or restore.

Looking for a Reliable Cloud Backup and Restore Provider?

Wanclouds, a leading Cloud and Managed Services provider, is a viable option for your backup and restore needs. It provides reliability and cost-effectiveness. Experienced with platforms like IBM and AWS, Wanclouds ensures that your workloads remain safe in the cloud and can be retrieved instantly.

Moreover, Wanclouds offers 24/7 monitoring and support of expert engineers if you opt for Wancloud Managed Cloud Services. This will further ensure that

your data is secure and instantly recoverable.

Get started by filling out a form on our website or by contacting one of our sales representatives at [email protected]